


The Importance of Feasting Without Panthers

by executrix



Category: Elizabethan and Jacobean Theatre & Literature RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-18
Updated: 2015-12-18
Packaged: 2018-05-07 08:58:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5450912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A treat for waspabi, who likes "time-displaced AUs" as well as historical tales, and wanted to know about "that perpetual conflict between troublemaking Kit and more careful Will." Featuring Jam!Shakespeare.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Importance of Feasting Without Panthers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [waspabi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/waspabi/gifts).



Barnstorm Billy, one of the most successful actor-managers in all the West End and the touring circuit, checked the time on the silver half-hunter from his waistcoat pocket. It was half-eleven in the morning. BB earned the sobriquet because his voice could reach the back of the largest provincial Corn Market converted to theatrical use, and he continued to tour his most successful productions as long as a farthing was to be earned anywhere in the British Isles. 

For a while, he treated his ever-rising brow as proof of intellectuality. When he was forced to confess to balding, he eked out a season or two as Leading Man with wigs. The company was relieved when he transferred to the Heavy Line. His Matthias, in “The Bells,” would terrify you. It was like reading Beaumont and Fletcher by flashes of limelight.

BB had already visited several of the low dives that his house playwright was known to frequent. At least this time, Marlowe didn’t have to be fetched from the opium den (where that fellow Drood was positively unpleasant). He looked over his shoulder to make sure no one he knew could see him at the next low dive on his list. BB rapped at the door. After a closer look at the door knocker, he brushed his hands together fastidiously. 

He posed inquiries; at last, his quest was successful. BB was ushered upstairs to a little room. With the ease of long practice, he disentangled Marlowe from a knot of telegraph boys. BB paid them to depart, and set down the amount in his tables (a small wash-leather notebook, with a silver pencil, that he kept in his pocketbook), to be deducted from the payment for the next play. 

“’The harlot’s cry, from street to street, will be all England’s winding-sheet,’” he muttered. One of the youths took this opportunity to say, “Oi, guv, thought I might stop dollymopping, I’ve been meaning to try acting…” Billy sighed, took out a Shakespeare & Company visiting card, scrawled “Tuesdays at 9:30 sharp” and said, “Hand this to Jock at the stage door.” 

It was the consensus among Theatricals that Shakespeare & Company had the prettiest Walking Gentlemen in the business, though not necessarily those most burdened by talent. In various boarding houses catering to Theatricals on tour, questions were raised as to which spears were carried.

“Can I bring my sister along? She’s not on the game, she’s a ‘ousemaid in ‘Ackney…that’s to say, a housemaid in Hackney.” Shakespeare, approving of the emendation, nodded. 

From beneath a web of sheets and blankets, Marlowe piped up, “Thousands of virtuous women on the English stage! And only six actresses!” He sat up, yawned, emerged from his chrysalis, and began to pace. “You needn’t avert your eyes,” he said, although it was not entirely clear to whom. “Nothing you haven’t seen before.”

“You must get down to work, Kit,” Billy said. “I need a new play from you, in time to rehearse before the tour. It’s all very well claiming that life is so tedious that you must have stimulation, like that detective chappie in the Strand, but I can’t continue to subsidize you if you don’t write plays I can use.” 

“None of my charming new acquaintances from the Strand could have been detectives, or I shouldn’t have been here.”

Shakespeare glared. “The magazine, as you know very well.”

“I just gave you a new play, Billy, whatever have you done with it?”

“Splendid as I thought it was, you know perfectly well we can’t depict Biblical personages on the stage.” 

Shakespeare refrained from saying that just because Marlowe seemed determined to get himself arrested for one thing didn’t mean that everyone else in the company wanted to get arrested for anything else, in this case blasphemy. Shakespeare fumed silently. He was a busy man, too busy for hobbies, but he vowed that, if Marlowe didn’t shape up, Shakespeare himself would go back to a few slight sketches he had written (after all, anyone could do it; even clowns ad-libbed), polish them up, and slap Marlowe’s name on them while it was still good box-office.

Marlowe, suddenly sobered up by the prospect of a business discussion, buttoned his trousers and sat down on the edge of the bed. “What about a club performance?” He resumed his shirt, tucked it into his trousers, wriggled into his braces, and headed for the chair where one of his erstwhile companions had neatly folded his coat. He abstracted a green carnation from a vase on the window-sill and threaded it into his buttonhole.

“Even that’s chancy. And you know that the real money isn’t in London, it’s on tour. And I can’t see the Americans stealing it, which is how you know you’ve really arrived. It’s not their sort of play at all.”

BB escorted Marlowe back to his lodgings, then went to the theater for a frustrating afternoon’s office work. The takings were down. He wondered if he’d have to revive “The Corsican Brothers” again. The notices for the current play were abominable. The Ingenue was pregnant, the Soubrette menopausal, the Low Comic announced his intention to take orders. The Ghost Trap made a dreadful noise, which was fair enough, but it stuck half-way, which was not. He made a note to tell old Mole, the theater carpenter, to work in the cellarage.

The 6:17 for Stratford (shockingly, three minutes late by Bradshaw; Shakespeare wondered what the world was coming to) puffed away from the station. Shakespeare took a sheaf of typescript out of his portmanteau. He kept a platoon of typewriter-girls, the most downtrodden of all had to deal with Marlowe’s foul papers, to transcribe the company’s paperwork. 

This bundle was a prentice piece of Marlowe’s, cast aside and never produced, that might have some possibilities. One could see the inception of his mighty line. And “Labour’s Love Won” was a fair to middling title. Shakespeare thought that he’d have to tone it down a bit, for the provinces, but the greenery-yallery crowd were surprisingly willing to take tickets to political plays, as long as they had a bit of romance thrown in as well. They’d even stand for a bit of socialism, as long as the play was about fashionably dressed aristocrats.

Despite his up-to-date stylographic pen, Shakespeare still found it confoundedly difficult to write on a train; he wasn’t like that Trollope fellow able to hack out his thousand words an hour on an omnibus, on a ferry, or perched on a howdah. 

BB wanted to get the play up on its feet as quickly as possible. He himself had a wife and children (who dwelt in the pleasure of the good suburbs), but Marlowe had no such protection. He might have to flee to France, or other tolerant jurisdiction, at any moment. 

BB skimmed through the play, realizing that, although it had a good strong conflict and a good part for his leading man, it was abominably constructed. He made an aide-memoire about which scenes should be moved to make a workable structure. He thought that two of the characters could be combined, which would save a salary. Another role could be expanded so that Shakespeare’s own legion of admirers could be satisfied. Shakespeare was still making installment payments on the company’s Venetian Garden drop, which had been quite expensive, so perhaps one of the climactic scenes could be set in a garden. The gondolas would have to be masked insofar as the play took place in Mayfair. 

It’s not as deep as a well, Shakespeare thought. But none the worse for that; you couldn’t keep a company going on just the University trade. Nor as broad as a church door. But it would do, would serve.


End file.
